How to be a professional gamer?

In a move to capitalise on the massive popularisation of online competitive games, a new organisation calling itself the Professional Gamers Association or PGsA released its first press announcement today.

“The Professional Gamers Association is about to launch the first ever worldwide gamers association website and service. The PGsA has been established to promote eSports worldwide and to provide a fair, equitable and truly independent and unique ranking system for gamers.”

The move may come as a bit of a shock for other professional gaming organisations such as the CPL, WCG and ESWC, who have all made moves in recent years to try and secure themselves as industry leaders – providing tournaments and big money prizes to the top individuals and teams of the most popular online games.

The PGsA service looks to act as a database system for all tournaments worldwide on all gaming platforms, ranging from your mobile phone to your PC. If a game is being played competitively, they're view is that there should be a standardisation scoring system so we can know who the best at each particular game is.

“The PGsA enables tournament organisers of all sizes to register their events and have all their events advertised to players and sponsors alike. All registered events will contribute towards the player's or Team's world, region and country rankings.”

Despite professional gaming becoming big business, there are still those who are sceptical, certainly about the proposition of a business made around keeping up to date league tables of tournaments and gamers. However, with PGsA's promise of prestigious awards to the best performing gamers and large commercial backing, only time will tell whether such a venture is plausible.